I stayed inside for 96 hours

I’m back in Pittsburgh for the holidays as of Saturday. Hanukkah starts the same night as Christmas, if you can believe it. I’m feeling an appropriate amount of weird for being home but have been keeping busy enough to stove a lot of it off. I’m not sure how consistent I’ll be with writing next week because I’ll be in Florida.

I’m not sure how you usually feel around this time of year but probably a mix. If you’re with your family and like them, hug them tight. If you’re with them and you don’t, it will be over soon. If you’re not with your family and you like them, take a walk. If you’re not with your family and you don’t like them, eat a holiday treat. If you have complicated feelings about this time of the year, join the (thankfully large) club. If you feel crazy at any point this next week, you can always talk to me. Happy holidays!

I have a few small thoughts to get through for you this week, which was uneventful because…

This whole thing is going to sound delusional, just so you know. I have waited so long to get my COVID x flu shots because I know they’ll take me out for multiple days, and I couldn’t find a three-day window I felt comfortable being out of commission for. I tried once when I was on my mom’s insurance, but CVS stopped being able to take it so I just waited.

I went to the gym Monday night so I wouldn’t feel bad about not moving for the following days. After my sesh, I got my shots then tucked in for a cozy, easy night. I woke up the next morning feeling brain foggy, exhausted, and chills-tastic. I ended up having a fever later that night. This is sometimes how I get through my shots, and it sometimes feels nice because it’s proof that the shots are working.

I assumed I’d take the next morning off of work. When I woke up, I felt a sinus thing and decided that was enough for me to call out for the morning. I Slacked my lil crew and told them I’d check in around noon after what I thought would be a morning of scrolling or watching. I put on the new Julia Louis Dreyfus podcast episode (season finale with…Nancy Pelosi…) and ended up falling asleep 10 minutes into the episode. I woke up again what I thought was 30 minutes later, but it ended up being 2 p.m. I had two full nights sleeps within a day!

Wednesday felt less sick but I still didn’t leave the house, as the evening brought the Survivor finale. Thursday I could have left the house but ended up having my friend Clara over in the evening to watch The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. I finally left the house Friday evening to thrift a sparkly shirt for a gold-and-silver theme party, watch my friend Jordan’s band play, and go dance at the gold-and-silver theme party.

How did I feel during those two very sick days? Well, very sick and sleepy. I could not stop scrolling socials or watching Survivor. I don’t remember much else. How did I feel during those non-sick days that I still didn’t leave the house? Content to read, scroll, watch, and be cozy. It’s so cold outside. What a gift to have an apartment with heat. I think I come off as this very extroverted person, but (even though I love people) I love having multiple days inside. I get a lot done and nothing done at all. I think I’m really great at base-level relaxing, but it’s hard to truly sink into that feeling unless I do something like stay inside for 96 hours. The air felt good when I touched it again.

In the same day, I watched the finale of Survivor’s current season (47) as it aired as well as the show’s season 1 finale (obviously not as it aired). Survivor first aired in 2000 to a massive audience, many of whom grew up to compete on the show themselves after watching the show as kids.

What’s changed about the show: it’s based less on survival now and more on social strategy. The people playing now are gamebots and nerds that know too much about the game to be human. They also skew younger and richer with more white-collar jobs.

Season 1 spoiler if you dare: the guy who wins season 1 is Richard Hatch, the first Survivor player to truly play it like a game instead of as an opportunity to be stranded in Borneo for over a month. He made the first-ever alliances and was necessary to his tribe because he could fish. Rich is a fat (at the time because I thought he was just…not skinny, if that makes sense) gay guy who was openly conniving and freaky (walked around naked all the time, something he didn’t find sexual). He was smarter and more ruthless than the other contestants because the others never voted him off and were emotionally conflicted about the whole concept of eliminations.

The most interesting alliance of the show as between Richard and Rudy, a 75-year-old ex-Navy guy, who said multiple times how he did not agree with Richard’s lifestyle and choices, but that they made a good team (and they did — Richard’s initial 4-person alliance made it to the end of the game). Rudy gave Richard his word that he wouldn’t vote against him and he stuck to it, which I guess America really fell in love with.

The reunion of this season was wild. Some guy interviewed them months after filming in front of a studio audience and something about it felt very…old? Like how the Ed Sullivan Show or other old TV shows had a certain airiness about them. In what they called a scientific poll, Americans overwhelmingly voted Rudy as their fan favorite, which surprised me because he’s a curmudgeon that constantly defended his bigotry of all types by saying that he wouldn’t hear the end of it from his Navy buddies. Grow up! When the cast and host kept saying stuff like, But you still love your castmates, right? Rudy’d give a deadpan No, and everyone would laugh. I guess it’s nice that he was honest.

Survivor and a lot of other early reality shows were just a way for producers to broadcast What would it be like if we put a bunch of stereotypes in a room? That season had a maniac gay, closed-minded old men, an athletic Black guy with multiple baby mamas, multiple ditzy young white women, and various other stereotypes I’m forgetting.

Our world was so much less woke (sorry) and globalized even in 2000. One of the contestants even said the f-slur used at gay people multiple times (but not at Richard…hard to describe). I know there’s eventually a Survivor season that literally has teams against each other based on their race. Even though there’s almost unfathomable hatred all around us now, at least most reality shows don’t show crazy levels of bigotry like they used to. Now it’s more insidious, like how Black women never get picked on Love Island UK. This year’s Survivor winner (and well deserved) is Asian, which yielded Twitter discourse about if Asians are people of color, how the winner doesn’t really look Asian, etc. I’m exhausted!

I don’t really listen to Las Culturistas because I have enough gay things in my life, but my friend (and one of the most voracious non-journo and young news consumers I know) Clara implored me to listen to their episode with Angie K. If you don’t know anything about this show or woman, Angie is a rare slow burn in the housewives world, starting out as an obnoxious side character and, over the course of multiple seasons, winning domination over the group along with viewers’ hearts.

One of the main things you know about Angie is how she’s Greek. She talks about it in almost every conversation, hosted a Greek mafia-themed party, and has these sick Greek flag shades. I loved hearing her talk on this Las Cultch episode because she takes being a real housewife so seriously and is so overly grateful to talk to Bowen and Matt. So much of her brand is just being excited to be there. She reveres Andy Cohen and still worries that producers won’t want her back next year even though this was clearly her winning year.

One of the things I love most about RHOSLC is how important religion is in the show. Mormonism is everywhere not just in Salt Lake City but with these women. All of them have different relations to Mormonism that have fluctuated throughout their lives.

So much of Angie’s persona is based on how she was and is othered in Salt Lake City, and the way she talks about it sounds a bit like how I (and, to a much greater extent, my mom) grew up in the South Hills of Pittsburgh. Her family was the only Greek one and one of the only non-Mormon ones, which was isolating. My mom’s experience as the only Jewish person other than her sister at school sounded a bit like this. I know it’s probably hard for people from more diverse places to understand how white people can be othered when their communities are ultrawhite, but people will always find someone to push down!

Angie’s exaggerated (in a way that viewers love, of course) pride for her Greekness can sometimes simplify or even tokenize her, and I realized this because it looked a lot like how I tokenized myself in my Judaism growing up. In my elementary school of a few hundred kids, the only Jews were my brother, my two cousins, and me.

People think of Boston as a Catholic town, but Catholicism permeates every facet of Pittsburgh life in a way no where else but Vatican City can relate to (okay, exaggeration…but you get what I mean). I felt a disdain for a lot of Christian things from a very young age, and it almost felt like a popular kid leaving you out of some activity. Christmas especially made me angry. I’ve since lightened up a lot because everyone’s just trying to have fun in a cold season, but this used to be a big part of my thought process.

My mom would come in to my elementary school class every year to teach the kids about Hanukkah, which I always felt really proud of. She’d teach everyone about lighting the menorah and how to play dreidel, and everyone was of course super into it. I felt like I was the ambassador of my culture to my peers, and I was always quick to relate something back to Judaism if I felt the situation called for it. I remember describing myself as the token Jew once I heard that term for the first time in middle school. There were a few more Jews at this point, but I was the most outspoken about it.

I definitely wouldn’t call myself a token Jew today because that reduces who I am, but I think I used it at the time as some sort of armor that I must have needed to feel more confident in myself. I bet this is a common experience for a lot of diaspora Jews, but a lot of us also shrink into assimilation (something I feel like I’ve found myself doing more as I’ve grown).

So, what is the line between cultural pride and tokenization? What’s the difference between making your culture accessible to others and making yourself a caricature for others to gawk at? Is tokenization something you do to yourself or something that others do to you? I’m obviously not sure and am definitely at a less steady place in my Judaism today than I was when I was calling myself a token Jew. I think minorities just do what they need to do to survive, and you figure out over time what version of yourself brings you peace. It’s kind of like how baby gays dress like femme/masc stereotypes and wear tacky clothes before figuring out what their true personal style is.

In a time that I don’t go to temple — which has always been what makes me feel the most Jewish — it’s nice having this newsletter to wrestle with my identity. Isn’t writing about your faith something Jewish scholars have been doing since antiquity?

Back to our housewives: the only non-Mormons on the cast right now are coincidentally enemies, Angie (Greek Orthodox, duh) and Meredith Marks (Jewish legend). Meredith doesn’t have much of a storyline for especially the first half of the season and spends a lot of it prepping for her Bat Mitzvah, something most Jews do as 13-year-olds but Meredith wants to do to reaffirm her faith. My mom did her Bat Mitzvah at 40 right before I did mine, which was such a cool thing to do. Meredith’s Bat Mitzvah episode was actually pretty cool (and it was hilarious to hear her unplaceable but very Jewish accent say baruch atah adonai notein hatorah). The housewives were honored to attend, and some of them cried.

At the afterparty, Angie ended up in a fight with Britani and told her she had high body-count hair, which is objectively hilarious but was not hilarious to Meredith, who subsequently kicked her out of the gathering. Angie’s original beef with Britani came because Britani was offended Angie brought her a bottle of wine to a Mormon prayer circle thing because that’s sacrilegious (even though Britani does drink). Angie and Meredith should be commiserating about the hypocrisy of Mormon women as they search for acceptance in their community of many rules, but that obviously doesn’t happen.

Maybe these women will someday see that their differences, when combined, bring them strength. One of these differences Angie points out is how Meredith was not born in SLC and lives between multiple cities currently. Angie is a born-and-bred, proud Salt Lake City girl. She is 50 and has had a whole life of wrestling with her identity. She’s built a business empire and Greek family that includes (unrelated to Greekness) a dog with dyed fur.

I think her mission is a sincere one: to show her castmates, her homogenous city, and our ever-divided country the awesomeness of being Greek in a way unparalleled since cinematic masterpiece My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It can feel like tokenization because reality TV flattens things, but there’s always so much edited out. The next time you see someone being tokenized, think about what didn’t make the edit you’re watching.

I know this sentence delighted my Pittsburgh readers. Charlie is dating my lifelong friend Ryan and is now my friend. He’s visiting Pittsburgh for the second time and came over to chat. They regaled me with tales of their trip, which included a stop at Pittsburgh’s premier (and only, since it’s a chain) diner, Eat’n Park. Eat’n Park’s the place for smiles, as commercials have shown me forever. Their signature dessert is a smiley cookie, which is a sugar cookie with a smile iced on it.

This is the place you go for Sunday brunch with grandma in your youth, your musical castmates in high school, and your high friends at 3 a.m. during holiday breaks. Eat’n Park is so quintessentially Pittsburgh. It’s sometimes really good, other times really crappy. They have menu items with such Western PA names like grilled stickies. If you want to hear a Pittsburgh accent in action, go here.

Anyway, Charlie is from Queens. He then tells us that he first thought Eat’n Park was spelled Eaton Park, which sound much more sophisticated. This made me laugh. Of course Pittsburgh has to pick the dumbest sounding thing. Also, you park then eat. I Googled Eaton Park, and it’s a small park in Hatsboro, right outside of Philadelphia.